A confectioner’s shop and a round chocolate.

Droste began in Haarlem in 1863, when the baker and confectioner Gerardus Johannes Droste opened a shop in the Grote Houtstraat. Dutch Wikipedia dates the opening to 10 June 1863 and says the shop was called the Salon de Refraîchissements; among the things it sold were round, flat chocolates he named Pastilles Droste. The pastille is still the brand’s signature product, and its current website says the pastilles are pressed into shape rather than cast.

Chocolate-making soon outgrew the shop. English Wikipedia, drawing on the company’s own history, says the firm G.J. Droste opened its first factory in 1890 and in 1891 moved to a site on the Spaarne river, where raw materials could arrive, and finished goods leave, by boat. In 1897 the founder handed the business to his sons, Jan Coenraad and Gerardus Johannes junior. In 1898 the firm won the right to carry the coat of arms of Queen Dowager Emma; after 1900 it exported to Belgium, Germany and France, and it entered the American market in 1905.

Around 1900 Droste put on its cocoa packaging the picture that made its name famous far beyond chocolate: a woman in a nurse’s uniform carrying a tray with a cup of milk and a box of Droste cocoa — on which the same woman appears again, holding the same box. The artist is believed to have been the Haarlem commercial illustrator Jan (Johannes) Misset, working from Jean-Étienne Liotard’s eighteenth-century pastel La Belle Chocolatière, according to English and Dutch Wikipedia. The picture within a picture gave its name to the Droste effect, the term still used in art, mathematics and photography for an image that recursively contains itself.

A Royal factory on the Spaarne, then a chain of owners.

Droste became a limited company in 1920, as Droste’s Cacao- en Chocoladefabrieken N.V., and by 1930 more than 800 people worked at the Spaarne factory, with sales offices in cities including London, Paris, Prague and New York, English Wikipedia says. Dutch Wikipedia adds that in 1931 a six-metre neon version of the company’s pastille-man figure went up on the factory roof — a figure first drawn by the in-house designer Jan Wiegman and, reportedly, restyled by the French poster artist A.M. Cassandre.

After the Second World War the founder’s grandsons Jan and Martinus Droste ran the business. By the early 1960s Droste employed more than 1,000 people and exported 40 per cent of its output to 60 countries; a new cocoa factory opened in 1961, and in 1964 it received the Royal predicate, becoming Koninklijke Droste Fabrieken N.V.

Independence ended in the 1970s. In 1975 Droste joined the Van Nelle food and tobacco group; in 1977 it passed into American ownership — English Wikipedia names Standard Brands, Dutch Wikipedia Sara Lee — and, NOS reported, lost the “Royal” title. Production moved to Vaassen, in Gelderland, in 1986. The Dutch sugar and food group CSM bought Droste in 1989, according to NOS and Dutch Wikipedia (English Wikipedia gives 1990), and on 1 January 1997 sold it to the German confectioner Hosta. The old Haarlem factory buildings were later converted into apartments.

Dutch chocolate, old and new.

The seven brands in this group all make or sell chocolate, and they come from three countries with distinct chocolate habits: Perugina and Baratti & Milano from Italy, Valor and Blanxart from Spain, and Droste, Verkade and Van Houten from the Netherlands. Each country is known for a different way of using cocoa, and those habits shape how the brands present themselves.

In the Netherlands the story is cocoa powder: the pressed, alkalised “Dutch” cocoa that made a drink of chocolate easy to mix, sold in tins and boxes whose graphics became part of the brand. In Italy it is gianduja, chocolate blended with hazelnut paste and associated above all with Piedmont, alongside pralines and boxed gifts. In Spain it is chocolate a la taza, a thick drinking chocolate served in cafés, often with churros, alongside bars made for melting into it. The names here range from century-old firms now owned by large groups to family companies, and some survive mainly as brands.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — who founded it, who owns it now, where its cocoa comes from and where its chocolate is made — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From Vaassen to Kraków.

The past few years have been the most turbulent in the brand’s history. In August 2024 NOS reported that Droste, by then a company of about 30 people in Vaassen, had been hit by the collapse of airport and export sales during the pandemic, energy costs nearly four times higher and a sharp rise in cocoa prices; the Belgian company Pauwels Engineering, owner of the Koetjesreep bar, announced that it would take the business over. In February 2025 NOS, citing Omroep Gelderland, reported that the deal had fallen through and that dismissal had been requested for the 27 remaining employees. NU.nl later reported that production in Vaassen had stopped in July 2024 and that the chocolates disappeared from Dutch supermarkets early in 2025.

In November 2025 the brand was bought by Wawel, the chocolate maker of Kraków, NU.nl and Levensmiddelenkrant reported in September 2026. Wawel says it will bring the round pastilles back to Dutch shops under the line “The Other Chocolate,” in four versions — milk, sea-salt caramel, raspberry and 64 per cent cocoa — made in Poland; English Wikipedia names Wawel’s plant at Dobczyce. No date for the return had been given when NU.nl reported the plan. Dutch Wikipedia says the new packaging and campaign were developed by the Dutch agency Alfred International, and the trade title Marketing Report reported that Droste had chosen Alfred for its international relaunch. The Droste website now gives Wawel S.A. in Kraków as its contact. Where the cocoa beans come from is not stated in the sources we checked.

For a design guide, Droste shows how a single packaging illustration can outlive factories and owners and become a word in its own right. Compare Wawel, its new owner, and Van Houten, another Dutch cocoa name. For this guide we use cocoa brown, nurse white and a Delft blue with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Droste’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.